GarageBand’s podcasting limitations

Today I ran into the 999 measure limit in GarageBand. The app is built with music in mind, with a default of 120 beats per minute. When I dragged in a couple podcast tracks that clocked in at one hour and 14 minutes, I couldn’t hear all the way to the end and my waveforms weren’t showing up in the editor. Turns out it was too much information for GarageBand to natively display (despite that I’m on a quad processor desktop with 3Gb of RAM) and you have to turn down the beats per minute to 40. Once you do that, everything will magically work just fine.

Jon: That is a valid point, it may be overkill.
But if one is serious about podcasting, I can’t see how they would use Garageband.
I’d say at the very least, invest in industry standard software/hardware (just a few hundred bucks can get a Pro Tools Mini that ships with Pro Tools LE) to expand control over editing, mixing, use of high-end plugins, etc.
Obviously there is a learning curve with Pro Tools LE, but it’s well worth it. I would go so far as to say Pro Tools LE is to Photoshop CS3 as Garageband is to some free paint app off of Version Tracker.